It seems like everyone freaks out whenever Google makes an update to their search algorithm when in reality not everyone has a good reason to do so. Sure, Google makes a mistake or two and some innocent sites get lower SERPs because of it, but that’s pretty unavoidable as nothing is perfect. Thankfully, if you think you’ve been wronged by Google, you can always resubmit yourself for consideration.
What a lot of people forget about these updates is that Google isn’t changing the SEO game. They are not trying to change the rules for “Whitehat” SEOs who actually do things by the book. More than anything, they are only trying to prevent “Blackhat” SEOs who’ve decided to spend their time exploiting the system. It’s undeniable that with every update Google releases to their search engine, the results just keep getting better. This is a sign that those who are removed probably didn’t belong there in the first place. If you ever hear a someone complaining too heavily about a Google update, you might want to question their SEO ethics. The people who got hurt the most in both recent major updates were those who used a paid service or spammy link wheels to try and boost their SERPs.
As long as you haven’t been spammy, you are probably okay. I personally don’t know too many people who’ve experienced a drop, and the ones who have seen drops for the most part probably knew it was coming one of these days.
One thing about SEO that’s never changed is the power of Anchor Text. Anchor Text is basically what’s blue and underlined in a hyperlink – it’s whatever is clickable. Whenever you put a link on your site to another site, it’s a “vote” in Google’s eyes. So, say you want to rank for “Awesome Site Stuff”. What you’d want to do to take advantage of Anchor Text is go find yourself a few friends who have quality – read, QUALITY – websites with a PR rank of at least 1-2 (just so you know it’s not a spam/crap site) and have them embed a link to your website somewhere in their content with the clickable text “Awesome Site Stuff”. If you can get enough people to do this, chances are you’ll find yourself ranking for “Awesome Site Stuff”. This is a proven system that Google has used since the dawn of its time.
The fact that this simple concept has been such a standard in SEO since the beginning of the industry as a whole is also why people tend to want to purchase bulk link-building services like LinkJuice. While purchasing membership to services like these might seem like a very attractive idea on the surface, be warned… these link building services are actually pretty Blackhat in nature and not exactly holy in Google’s eyes. In fact, there have been times in the past where Google has pulled the plug on specific link building services by simply killing the rankings of every site that associated themselves with those link building services or by killing the free domain services they used (like when they killed co.cc from the index for a few months last summer). Try not to be part of that. Be sure to get your backlinks with anchor text from quality sources such as your friends’ company websites, ghost writing, or any of the other Whitehat methods you’ll find online.
A good case study showing how powerful Anchor Text is is to Google the worlds “Click Here”. You’ll likely see something similar the following:
Adobe Reader is the top ranking site for the search phrase “Click Here”, and chances are it always will be. Why? Because whenever you see a website offering a handful of PDF files, it’s extremely common to have the words “Click Here” as the hyperlinked text to download Adobe Reader, and so many people have put that code at the bottom of their websites that Adobe Reader has basically cemented itself as the top ranking site for that keyword for life – and it’s been this way through Google’s Panda update, Penguin update, and the like.
The moral of the story is if you build your business on search engine traffic, make sure you do it right. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If it feels too easy, it’s probably Blackhat. Whitehat SEO will take you much, much longer to build correctly and effectively, and if you are doing it for a client, they might not be very impressed with you right off the bat. However, just wait till Google rolls the next big update out and your client’s search position is still standing, or has even improved… your clients will love you for life!
